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Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions

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ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION

Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions

Brett W. Pelham, Matthew C. Mirenberg, and John T. Jones

State University of New York at Buffalo

Because most people possess positive associations about themselves, most people prefer things that are connected to the self (e.g., the letters in one’s name). The authors refer to such preferences as implicit egotism. Ten studies assessed the role of implicit egotism in 2 major life decisions: where people choose to live and what people choose to do for a living. Studies 1–5 showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis). Study 6 extended this finding to birthday number preferences. People were disproportionately likely to live in cities whose names began with their birthday numbers (e.g., Two Harbors, MN). Studies 7–10 suggested that people disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names (e.g., people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among dentists). Implicit egotism appears to influence major life decisions. This idea stands in sharp contrast to many models of rational choice and attests to the importance of understanding implicit beliefs.

  • What role do people’s thoughts and feelings about themselves
  • important role in major life decisions. For example, only a handful

of studies have examined whether self-regulation processes influence people’s choice of relationship partners. Moreover, for practical reasons, most of these studies have examined attraction to strangers in the laboratory rather than attraction to long-term relationship partners (Huston & Levinger, 1978; but cf. Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996; Swann, Hixon, & de la Ronde, 1992). We thus know relatively little about whether self-evaluations or self-concept motives influence important decisions such as where people choose to live and what people choose to do for a living. Is there any reason to believe that self-evaluation shapes important life decisions? Consider the decisions of (a) choosing a city or state in which to live and (b) choosing a career. At first blush, it might seem that these decisions are largely independent. That is, there would appear to be no unifying psychological thread that connects a person’s taste in cities and career tracks. This does not mean that these important decisions are completely unrelated. Consider the dentist who is offered jobs in Milwaukee and in Phoenix. She might choose the job in Phoenix—either because it offers her greater professional rewards or because it offers her the promise of milder winters. Such obvious connections aside, however, it might be asking quite a bit of a single self-evaluative mechanism to predict people’s taste in both hometowns and occupations. play in their important day-to-day decisions and behaviors? Contemporary research on the self-concept suggests many answers to this question. For example, the desire to maintain positive feelings about the self appears to influence things as diverse as whether people derogate those who criticize their governments (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1997, 1999), whether people sabotage the performance of others when playing a game (Tesser & Smith, 1981), what people find rational (Kunda, 1990), and what people find humorous (Wills, 1981). Like people’s social beliefs and behavior, people’s beliefs about themselves are also influenced by the desire to view the self favorably. Most people have mostly favorable beliefs about themselves (see Crocker & Major, 1989; Greenberg & Pyszczynski, 1985; Miller & Ross, 1975; Paulhus & Levitt, 1987; Taylor & Brown, 1988; but cf. Kruger, 1999). In short, a great deal of evidence suggests that the motivation to feel good about the self plays a role in a wide variety of important social behaviors. To our knowledge, however, very little research on the self-concept addresses whether self-evaluation plays an

Brett W. Pelham, Matthew C. Mirenberg, and John T. Jones, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo. We thank Mauricio Carvallo, Joanne Davila, Tracy Dehart, Curtis Hardin, Sandra Murray, Shirley Owens, Mike Ross, and the participants of the 2000 Ontario Symposium for their insightful comments on this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brett W. Pelham, State University of New York, University at Buffalo, Park Hall— Department of Psychology, Buffalo, New York 14260-4110. E-mail: [email protected]

Implicit Egotism

Or would it? Research in implicit social cognition suggests that many mundane judgments and behaviors are influenced by potent and pervasive unconscious motives. For example, Greenwald and Banaji (1995) argued that the desire to feel good about the self permeates a wide range of social judgments. As an example,

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 82, No. 4, 469–487
Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.82.4.469

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students’ evaluations of instructors’ teaching skills tend to be more favorable when instructors give more lenient grades. Presumably, this is true because instructors who give students high grades satisfy students’ desires for favorable feedback. That is, unconscious self-enhancement seems to bias students’ evaluations of their instructors’ teaching skills. As noted previously, researchers have long assumed that people have a basic desire to feel good about themselves (Allport, 1961; James, 1890/1950). What sets recent research on self-enhancement apart from a great deal of earlier research is the contemporary assumption that many selfenhancing social cognitions occur automatically or unconsciously (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Hetts, Sakuma, & Pelham, 1999; Jones, Pelham, Mirenberg, & Hetts, 2002; Paulhus & Levitt, 1987; Pelham & Hetts, 1999; Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990; Pyszczynski et al., 1997, 1999). Research on unconscious self-enhancement—or what we call implicit egotism—suggests that people’s positive automatic associations about themselves may influence their feelings about almost anything that people associate with the self. For example, research on the mere ownership effect shows that giving people objects such as pens or keychains causes people to evaluate these object more favorably than they would otherwise (Beggan, 1992; Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990; Van Boven, Dunning, & Loewenstein, 2000). If people instantly acquire positive feelings about objects once these objects become part of the self, it stands to reason that people should develop deep and abiding affections for objects that are chronically associated with the self. In support of this idea, research on the name letter effect (Kitayama & Karasawa, 1997; Nuttin, 1985, 1987) shows that people like the letters that appear in their own names quite a bit more than they like letters that do not. This effect occurs for all of the letters in people’s names, but it is particularly pronounced for people’s first and last initials. This presumably unconscious self-enhancing bias has been documented in at least 14 countries (e.g., Greece, Japan, Spain, the United States). mere exposure. Instead, like the mere ownership effect, the name letter effect appears to qualify as a form of implicit egotism (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nuttin, 1987). The essential idea behind implicit egotism is that people should prefer people, places, and things that they associate (unconsciously) with the self. Although examples of unconscious self-enhancement have been documented for a variety of judgments and decisions, virtually all of the past research on unconscious self-enhancement simply documents the existence of positive associations to the self (but see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, for some exceptions). For instance, whereas existing research leaves little doubt that people like the letters in their own names, we know of no previous research examining behavioral consequences of the name letter effect. To our knowledge, the closest thing to this is Miller, Downs, and Prentice’s (1998) finding that people are nicer than usual to strangers who happen to share their birthdays. In particular, Miller et al.’s participants played more cooperatively than usual with a bogus interaction partner (in a prisoner’s dilemma game) when they thought they and their partner had the same birthday (see also Finch & Cialdini, 1989). If people truly prefer the specific letters that appear in their own names, then we might expect people to prefer physical or social objects that either contain or are represented by these same letters. For example, consider the case of a hypothetical person named Steve Spencer. If the name letter effect has implications for important social behaviors, it might not be too far-fetched to expect Steve to prefer to vacation in Sarasota rather than Miami, to choose to study stereotyping rather than attitudes, or to find himself collaborating with colleagues named Steven Fine (or Clyde Steele) rather than Russ Lazio. Although Steve would probably be unaware of the affective basis of his judgment, something about names such as Sarasota, stereotyping, and Steele should just feel good (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Lewicki, 1985; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Staats & Staats, 1957, 1958).
Although a high level of exposure to the letters that occur in one’s own name probably plays a role in the development of the name letter effect (see Zajonc, 1968), it seems unlikely that the name letter effect is determined exclusively by mere exposure (Nuttin, 1987). Consider a recent study of unmarried Japanese college students conducted by Kitayama and Karasawa (1997). These researchers observed the strongest evidence for the name letter effect for the first letter of women’s first names and for the first letter of men’s last names. They explained this gender difference by noting that there is a very strong expectation that Japanese women will change their family names when they marry. Thus, although there is no reason to assume that men and women differ in their level of exposure to their first versus last initials, women appear to have more positive feelings about the specific name letters that they know they will hold onto for their entire lives. Kitayama and Karasawa also found that people preferred numbers that were in their birthdays to numbers that were not. Moreover, in the case of the birthday numbers that do not overlap with birthday months (13–31), the magnitude of the evaluative bias associated with birthday numbers was slightly larger than the magnitude of the name letter effect. Because people are exposed to their birthday numbers much less often than they are exposed to their names, this further suggests that people’s elevated liking for objects that are associated with the self is not simply an affective consequence of
In this article, we present evidence from a wide range of archival studies that examined two different behavioral consequences of implicit egotism: (a) choosing a city or state in which to live and (b) choosing a career. Because the name letter effect lends itself particularly well to archival research using public records (e.g., telephone directories, memberships in professional organizations), we focus primarily on behavioral consequences of the name letter effect in this research. However, we assume that many other forms of implicit egotism (e.g., the preferences people have for their birthday numbers, implicit in-group bias) also have important consequences for day-to-day decisions. In the present studies, we made use of public records to identify people by their names or initials. We then examined whether people with specific kinds of names or initials (e.g., people named Dennis) gravitated toward specific places in which to live (e.g., Denver) or specific occupations (e.g., dentistry). Because past research suggested that the name letter effect is stronger for men’s last names and for women’s first names, we took this into account wherever it was pertinent. On the whole, however, we hoped to show that the name letter effect has important behavioral consequences for men and women alike. In our first study, we tested the idea that the positive associations people have for the letters in their names influence the city in which people choose to live.

IMPLICIT EGOTISM IN MAJOR LIFE DECISIONS

471

highly significant, ␹2(1) ϭ 38.25, p Ͻ .001. As shown in the lower half of Table 1, the results for men were also highly consistent with predictions. Just as Jacksonville seems to have been disproportionately inhabited by Jacks, Philadelphia seems to have been disproportionately inhabited by Philips, ␹2(1) ϭ 202.05, p Ͻ .001. Because all of the names used in Study 1 are common European American names, it is difficult to attribute these findings to an ethnic confound. It is even more difficult to attribute these findings to an age confound. In fact, to begin with the women, an examination of the birth dates of all of the decedents of Virginia Beach and Milwaukee indicated that the average resident of Milwaukee was noticeably older than the average resident of Virginia Beach (as indicated by a greater ratio of people born in 1990 versus 1950). The small difference in the ages of the two female names used in Study 1 worked in opposition to this city–age confound. Specifically, the name Mildred is slightly younger than the name Virginia. The same was true for the male names. Whereas the decedents of Philadelphia appear to have been somewhat older, on average, than the decedents of Jacksonville, Philip turns out to be a slightly younger name than Jack. Although the results of Study 1 suggest that implicit egotism may play a role in people’s choice of a hometown, these results are open to a highly plausible alternate explanation. Although it is possible that people gravitate toward places that remind them of themselves, it is also possible that the places in which people live serve as primes that influence the names that parents give to their children. To new parents living in Georgia, for example, baby names such as George or Georgia may simply be more accessible than more attractive alternatives such as Brett, John, or Matthew. Although this priming effect would be interesting in its own right, it has little to do with implicit egotism. In Study 2, we attempted to rule out this alternate explanation by focusing on surnames rather than first names. Because laboratory research has shown that surname letter liking is typically lower than first name letter liking, we suspected that surname effects might be smaller than first name effects. In light of this expectation, we sampled U.S. states rather than large cities. If people with surnames that resemble specific state names disproportionately populate these states, we can be relatively confident that the owners of these surnames (or, at a minimum, at least one of their ancestors) chose to live in these specific states.

Study 1

Method

In Study 1, we analyzed social security death index (SSDI) records available at a genealogical Web site (http://www.Ancestry.com). The searchable database available at this Web site is frequently updated and was generated from U.S. government records in May of 2001. These records include the more than 66 million deceased Americans who possessed social security numbers at their time of deaths. These SSDI records and their associated search engine are ideal for the present purposes because they (a) are highly comprehensive, (b) allow searches based on either first or last names, and (c) allow searches based on a person’s last known city or state of residence prior to death. Although it is not possible to download these data, the search engine that is a part of this Web site places no restrictions on the number of hits it returns (e.g., it makes it possible to determine exactly how many people named Gladys or Ezekiel have died in the United States since the beginning of the social security system). In Study 1, we first identified the 40 largest cities in the United States. We then consulted the 1990 census to identify all of the common (top 100) male and female first names that shared a minimum of their first three letters with any of these city names. Because the popularity of different first names varies with age, we selected the two qualifying European American female names that we could match most closely for age (based on the relative proportion of deceased people born in 1900 and 1950 who had these first names). We then repeated this procedure to produce the two most closely age-matched male names. The resulting name–city combinations for women were Mildred–Milwaukee and Virginia–Virginia Beach. The resulting combinations for men were Jack–Jacksonville and Philip– Philadelphia. To generate the data for Study 1, we created two separate 2 ϫ 2 name–city tables, one for women and one for men. We expected that the women and men whose first names resembled the name of a specific city would be over-represented among the deceased residents of that specific city.

Results and Discussion

The results for women appear in the upper half of Table 1. As shown in Table 1, women named Mildred and Virginia did seem to gravitate toward cities that resembled their first names. The association between name and place of residence for women was

Table 1

Likelihood of Living in a City as a Function of One’s First Name (Study 1)

Study 2

First name: Women

Method

  • City
  • Mildred
  • Virginia
  • Total

Study 2 was an expanded version of Study 1. However, in an effort to

generalize our findings to a wide range of surnames, we conducted surname searches based on the first few consecutive letters of each of the state names we sampled (rather than searching for one specific surname per state). We began by identifying an electronic telephone directory that was ideal for the present purposes, namely the WorldPages directory (http:// www.Worldpages.com). This directory will return as many as 2,000 hits in a specific U.S. or Canadian city, state, or province. We chose eight large U.S. states on the basis of population. Specifically, on the basis of 1990 census data, we identified the eight most populous U.S. states that had one-word names. (We eliminated states with two-word names because, with very few exceptions, people do not have two-word surnames. In addition, the first word in most two-word state names is more peripheral to the state name than is the second word.) We selected the initial letter strings
Milwaukee Virginia Beach Total
865 (806) 230 (289)
1095
544 (603) 275 (216) 819
1409
505
1914

First name: Men

  • Philip
  • Jack
  • Total

Jacksonville Philadelphia Total
436 (288) 968 (1116)
1404
111 (259)
1153 (1005) 1264
547
2121 2668

Note. Expected values (rounded to the nearest whole number) appear in parentheses.
PELHAM, MIRENBERG, AND JONES

472

for these searches by beginning with the first four letters of each state name in our list. When a four-letter string (e.g., Geor for Georgia) yielded too many hits to be listed by the search engine, we added the next consecutive letter(s) in the state name to narrow the search. When a four-letter string yielded no or very few hits (e.g., Ohio), we deleted letters from the end of the string, one at a time, to maximize number of hits realized. For example, we used Ohi (which fit within the 2,000 hit limit for all eight states) rather than Oh (which often exceeded the limit). Thus, in the case of every state in our list, we generated an initial surname letter string set that (a) matched each state name as well as possible and (b) maximized search size on the basis of the 2,000 hit constraint. The only exception to this procedure occurred for Pennsylvania. Penn yielded too many hits, and Penns yielded almost none. Our solution was to add y rather than s to Penn, yielding Penny. The two most obvious alternate solutions to this problem (either dropping Pennsylvania altogether or adding the final letter a rather than the next consecutive letter y to Penn) yielded findings slightly stronger than those reported herein. Because this directory occasionally yielded hits that appeared to be clubs, institutions or businesses (e.g., Florida, Gators) rather than people (e.g., Florian, David) we eliminated all such noisy hits within each state. Incidentally, the SSDI search engine used in Study 1 was not appropriate for Study 2 because it only allows searches based on exact names (rather than the first few letters of a name).

to be Latino, it is extremely difficult to attribute the large effects observed for these two states to a confound involving Latino versus European names. In short, despite the risks associated with drawing causal inferences from passive observational findings, we suggest that the best explanation for the findings of Studies 1–2 is that people are attracted to places that resemble their own names. Furthermore, although creative readers might be able to generate additional criticisms of these findings, alternate explanations based on ethnicity seem relatively implausible, and alternate explanations based on reverse causality (i.e., priming) no longer seem plausible at all. Because these findings challenge traditional assumptions about how people make major life decisions, critics may still wish to reserve judgment. One could argue, for example, that many of the surnames that were likely to have been generated in Study 2 were rather unusual. The results of Study 1 notwithstanding, are the examples of implicit egotism documented in Study 2 limited to highly unusual names? Do such findings generalize to people’s choice of cities rather than states? Study 3 was designed to address these questions.

Results and Discussion

Study 3

The results of Study 2 are summarized in Table 2. For five of the eight state–name pairs, the results were weakly to strongly in the predicted direction; for one of the pairs, the observed frequencies were very close to the expected frequencies; and for two pairs (Pennsylvania and Ohio), there were modest reversals. The findings for Ohio are likely a product of sampling error. This may be true of Pennsylvania as well. For instance, if one conducts a search based on names beginning with Penna, the results for Pennsylvania look much more reasonable (112.8 expected vs. 135 observed hits). Regardless of one’s preferred interpretation for any reversals, the overall name–state matching effect (with the reversals averaged in) was highly significant. The expected number of surname– state matches was 1,584.4 (16.64%), and the observed number of matches was 1,890 (19.86%), ␹2(1) ϭ 70.71, p Ͻ .001. It is worth noting that the states we sampled in Study 2 provide some excellent controls for potential ethnic confounds. For example, because exactly 32% of the residents of both Texas and California happen

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  • Impulsivity and the Self-Defeating Behavior of Narcissists

    Impulsivity and the Self-Defeating Behavior of Narcissists

    Personality and Social Psychology Review Copyright © 2006 by 2006, Vol. 10, No. 2, 154–165 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Impulsivity and the Self-Defeating Behavior of Narcissists Simine Vazire Department of Psychology The University of Texas at Austin David C. Funder Department of Psychology University of California, Riverside Currently prominent models of narcissism (e.g., Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001) primarily explain narcissists’self-defeating behaviors in terms of conscious cognitive and affec- tive processes. We propose that the disposition of impulsivity may also play an impor- tant role. We offer 2 forms of evidence. First, we present a meta-analysis demonstrat- ing a strong positive relationship between narcissism and impulsivity. Second, we review and reinterpret the literature on 3 hallmarks of narcissism: self-enhancement, aggression, and negative long-term outcomes. Our reinterpretation argues that impulsivity provides a more parsimonious explanation for at least some of narcissists’ self-defeating behavior than do existing models. These 2 sources of evidence suggest that narcissists’ quest for the status and recognition they so intensely desire is thwarted, in part, by their lack of the self-control necessary to achieve those goals. Narcissists are a puzzle. Their bragging and arro- This article begins by proposing that the widely ac- gance interferes with the attainment of the status and cepted cognitive–affective processing model presented recognition they so poignantly desire. Why do they by Morf and Rhodewalt (2001) be extended to include continually undermine themselves in this way? The re- dispositional impulsivity. We then review the empirical search literature appears to have achieved some con- evidence for our proposal by presenting a sensus about the nature of sub-clinical narcissism1 meta-analysis of the relationship between narcissism with respect to underlying cognitive, social, and affec- and impulsivity, including unpublished results from tive processes (e.g., Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001).
  • Intellectual Humility and the Curse of Knowledge

    Intellectual Humility and the Curse of Knowledge

    Forthcoming in Arrogance and Polarization. Eds. A. Tanesini and M. Lynch. Routledge. Intellectual Humility and the Curse of Knowledge Michael Hannon University of Nottingham This chapter explores an unappreciated psychological dimension of intellectual humility. In particular, I argue there is a plausible connection between intellectual humility and epistemic egocentrism. Epistemic egocentrism is a well-known cognitive bias – often called ‘the curse of knowledge’ – whereby an agent attributes his or her own mental states to other people. I hypothesize that an individual who exhibits this bias is more likely to possess a variety of traits that are characteristic of intellectual humility. This is surprising because intellectual humility is often regarded as an antidote to cognitive biases, whereas I claim that a particular cognitive bias (namely, the curse of knowledge) may help foster an intellectual virtue. Introduction Intellectual humility is widely considered a virtue.1 Although there is no consensus within philosophy or psychology on a precise definition of intellectual humility, it has been linked to an assortment of desirable traits. For example, intellectual humble people have been said to: not think too highly of themselves; not ascribe to themselves greater excellence than they possesses; show low concern for how special their talents are; take complaints and criticism seriously; generously acknowledge the contributions of others; and not demand special treatment, even 1 For example, see Church and Barrett (2016), Hazlett (2012), Roberts and Wood (2003), Samuelson et al. (2015), Tanesini (2018), and Whitcomb et al. (2017). when deserving. This virtue has been studied by philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, and it seems to involve a mix of cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and motivational components.
  • Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem in Relation to the Dark Triad

    Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem in Relation to the Dark Triad

    © 2014 WUPJ, September 2014, Volume 2 Personality Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem in Relation to the Dark Triad Lauren Stenason* Individuals with characteristics encompassing the three domains of the Dark Triad (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) are often thought to possess inflated levels of self-esteem however, there has been controversy as to whether this inflated self-esteem represents their true underlying level of self-esteem. The present study investigated the relationships between the Dark Triad, explicit, and implicit self-esteem. Participants consisted of 231 individuals from The University of Western Ontario with an age range of 17 to 45 years (M = 19.390, SD = 2.908). 81% of participants were female and 19% of participants were male. Participants completed an online survey consisting of the Short Dark Triad, Rosenberg Self- Esteem Scale, and the Name Letter Task. The analysis revealed that Machiavellianism showed a weak negative correlation with last name initial. However, Machiavellianism and explicit self-esteem were not significantly correlated with first name initial. Narcissism showed a moderate positive correlation with explicit self-esteem and a weak positive correlation with last name initial but no significant relationship between narcissism and first name initial. Psychopathy did not reveal any significant correlations with either explicit or implicit self-esteem. Multiple regression analysis revealed that narcissism and psychopathy added significantly to the prediction of explicit self-esteem. Self-esteem is involved in many domains The components of the Dark Triad are regarding personality, psychological disorders, considered maladaptive personality traits that and overall mental health. Different types of include narcissism, psychopathy, and personality characteristics involve varying Machiavellianism.
  • NEWSLETTER World War II

    NEWSLETTER World War II

    PPPOLISH AAAMERICAN AAARTS AAASSOCIATION of Washington, DC NNeewwsssssslllllleetttttttttttteerrrrrr Spring/Summer 201 2014 444 Member of the American Council for Polish Culture, Inc. since 1961966666 Ojczyzna: The Fine Dancers from Baltimore began dancing in Oberek when he was a teenager. He spent three summers in Poland where he completed training as a dancer and received a certificate as a choreographer of Polish folk dance. In the early 1980s, Trojaki and Oberek were joined and became known as Ojczyzna. Bolek Król met his wife Jeannette when she came to dance with Trojaki in 1976. After they married and adopted twin boys from Poland, they took a break from dancing. Dennis also put dancing and directing aside to complete his Doctorate in Physical Therapy. As a result, the ensemble closed shop and stored its extensive costume collection for a number of years. In 2010, Dennis decided to return to his first love of Polish song and dance and took up the position of the Albo śmy to jacy tacy, ino chłopcy krakowiacy.... Artistic Director and choreographer of Ojczyzna. The group has Oh, what fine Kraków lads we are.... since performed throughout the Baltimore and Washington areas at various festivals, cultural and social events, including the Wianki The moment they appear in their colorful Kraków finery and on the National Mall and the ACPC 2013 National Convention. take the first turn to the lively Krakowiak music, you know that they They perform and present educational seminars at community are fine lads, and lassies, indeed. The Ojczyzna Polish Dancers colleges on Polish dance, costumes and other features of Polish from Baltimore, Maryland, have been amazing audiences for years culture.
  • Pindar and the Poetics of Autonomy: Authorial Agency in Pindar’S Fourth Pythian Ode

    Pindar and the Poetics of Autonomy: Authorial Agency in Pindar’S Fourth Pythian Ode

    I PINDAR AND THE POETICS OF AUTONOMY: AUTHORIAL AGENCY IN PINDAR’S FOURTH PYTHIAN ODE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dennis Robert Alley May 2019 II ©2019 Dennis Robert Alley III PINDAR AND THE POETICS OF AUTONOMY: AUTHORIAL AGENCY IN PINDAR’S FOURTH PYTHIAN ODE Dennis Robert Alley Cornell University 2019 Over the last decade a growing number of scholars have questioned the veracity of the longstanding commission-fee model which placed the Greek lyric poet Pindar in the thrall of various aristocratic patrons to secure his pay. This seismic shift in our view on Pindar’s composition reveals manifold new questions to explore in its wake. What happens to our understanding of the 45 extant odes and extensive fragments, when, for example, angling for commission no longer mandates procrustean generic strictures? How do we understand praise poetry if not as exclusively solicited and sold? Where do we even begin examining the odes under this new model? Pindar and the Poetics of Autonomy suggests one ode in particular has suffered from the rigidity of scholarly expectations on commission and genre. In the corpus of Pindaric epinicia, Pythian Four, written around 462 for Arcesilaus the fourth of Cyrene, is conspicuously anomalous. At 299 exceptionally long lines, the poem is over twice as long as the next longest ode. While most epinicia devote considerable space in their opening and closing sections to celebrating the present victory, Pythian Four makes only one clear mention of it.
  • Threatened Egotism, Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Direct and Displaced Aggression: Does Self-Love Or Self-Hate Lead to Violence?

    Threatened Egotism, Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Direct and Displaced Aggression: Does Self-Love Or Self-Hate Lead to Violence?

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 1998, Vol. 75, No. 1, 219-229 0022-3514/98/S3.00 Threatened Egotism, Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Direct and Displaced Aggression: Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Lead to Violence? Brad J. Bushman Roy F. Baumeister Iowa State University Case Western Reserve University It has been widely asserted that low self-esteem causes violence, but laboratory evidence is lacking, and some contrary observations have characterized aggressors as having favorable self-opinions. In 2 studies, both simple self-esteem and narcissism were measured, and then individual participants were given an opportunity to aggress against someone who had insulted them or praised them or against an innocent third person. Self-esteem proved irrelevant to aggression. The combination of narcissism and insult led to exceptionally high levels of aggression toward the source of the insult. Neither form of self-regard affected displaced aggression, which was low in general. These findings contradict the popular view that low self-esteem causes aggression and point instead toward threat- ened egotism as an important cause. How do people's thoughts and feelings about themselves in- of personal and social problems (e.g., California Task Force, fluence their propensities to perform acts of aggression against 1990). Consistent with this view, it has been widely asserted others? Multiple answers to this question can be suggested. For that low self-esteem is a cause of violence (e.g., Kirschner, decades, clinical psychologists have subscribed to a conven- 1992; Long, 1990; Oates & Forrest, 1985; Schoenfeld, 1988; tional view that low self-esteem underlies aggression.